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Federal Judge Rules Pa.’s Shutdown Order Unconstitutional; Wolf Administration Will File Appeal

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Pennsylvania Tyrants

PITTSBURGH (KDKA/AP) – Gov. Tom Wolf’s administration says it will appeal a federal judge’s ruling that pandemic restrictions that required people to stay at home, placed limits on gatherings and ordered “non-life-sustaining” businesses to close are unconstitutional.

Butler, Fayette, Greene and Washington counties — and some Republican officials like Congressman Mike Kelly and state Reps. Marcie Mustello, Daryl Metcalfe and Tim Bonner — filed a lawsuit against Gov. Wolf and Secretary of Health Dr. Rachel Levine.

“We didn’t seek a dollars worth of damages, we sought a declaration that these things were wrong and that’s exactly what Judge Stickman’s order finds. The state was wrong,” said Attorney Tom King.

Tom said the plaintiff’s constitutional rights were violated. The counties were in the “red” phase when they filed the lawsuit in May, saying the restrictions on businesses and gathering limits were unconstitutional.

“It declares that the stay at home orders were unconstitutional — should never have happened, that the business shutdown orders violate two sections of the U.S. Constitution and picking winners and losers shall not happen again in Pennsylvania under these circumstances,” King said.

U.S. District Judge William Stickman IV, an appointee of President Donald Trump, sided with the plaintiffs. Stickman wrote in his ruling that the Wolf administration’s pandemic policies have been overreaching, arbitrary and violated citizens’ constitutional rights.

The governor’s efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus “were undertaken with the good intention of addressing a public health emergency,” Stickman wrote. “But even in an emergency, the authority of government is not unfettered.”

A statement from a spokesperson for the governor’s office says the Wolf administration is “disappointed” with Stickman’s ruling and will seek a stay of the decision and file an appeal.

Courts had consistently rejected challenges to Wolf’s power to order businesses to close during the pandemic, and many other governors, Republican and Democrat, undertook similar measures as the virus spread across the country.

“The actions taken by the administration were mirrored by governors across the country and saved, and continue to save lives in the absence of federal action,” says the governor’s office.

Wolf has lifted many of the restrictions since the lawsuit was filed in May, allowing businesses to reopen and canceling a statewide stay-at-home order. But there still are restrictions in place.

Gatherings inside are limited to 25, and gatherings outside are capped at 250. A statewide order also limits indoor dining to 25 percent occupancy and prohibits drinking alcohol unless the drink comes with a meal. However, the Wolf administration announced capacity will be increased to 50 percent on Sept. 21.

“Today’s court ruling is limited to the business closure order and the stay at home orders issued in March and were later suspended, as well as the indoor and outdoor gathering limitations,” the governor’s office says.

“This ruling does not impact any of the other mitigation orders currently in place including, but not limited to the targeted mitigation orders announced in July, mandatory telework, mandatory mask order, worker safety order, and the building safety order.”

For the businesses that are still restricted, King said it’s up to the individual business if they want to reopen fully, and the ruling outlines the ability to do just that.

When it comes to monetary damages, King said this lawsuit was only about the declaration, but we could see individual business owners filing their own new lawsuits.

“I think based upon this decision, many private business owners are going to evaluate whether they have a cause of action for damages because there is no dispute, there are a million-plus businesses in Pennsylvania that have been significantly damaged,” said Thomas Breth, who was also an attorney on the case.

Pennsylvania has reported that more than 145,000 people statewide have contracted the virus since the beginning of the pandemic. More than 7,800 people have died.

This Article Originally Appeared On Pittsburgh CBS

A Pennsylvania town once known as ‘communism on the prairie’ is all about Trump now

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NORVELT, Pa. — Lois Weyandt was only 7 when her family moved to this government-built town in Southwestern Pennsylvania.

They had lost their home during the Great Depression, and Norvelt was a so-called homestead founded by New Deal Democrats to help out-of-work coal miners and other struggling families. Now 91, Weyandt glowingly recalls the tidy lawns in front of Cape Cod-style houses, the kind neighbors, and the idyllic community of her childhood.

“Everybody helped everybody else,” Weyandt said from her home in nearby Greensburg this month. “It was a very good community. If you needed something, you just went to your neighbor.”

Norvelt, first established as the Westmoreland Homesteads, was one of 92 such government-planned communities established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Families who successfully applied to live here got a house, a chicken coop, and a plot of land with a grape arbor, for which they paid rent.

There was a co-op farm where everyone was expected to work, a dairy barn, and a garment factory. The community was so collaborative that a local newspaper once described it as “communism on the prairie.” Weyandt remembers being called a socialist.

Weyandt’s love of Norvelt hasn’t changed. But her politics have. A lifelong Democrat, she became a Republican during Barack Obama’s presidency and supported Donald Trump in 2016. While she may have shrugged off the socialist label as a young homesteader, today she sees the 2020 election as a battle against socialism.

“I don’t believe in people working and getting what they make on their own and then somebody saying, ‘Well, I want some of it,’ and getting to take it,” she said. “That’s wrong. Let ‘em work for it. In Norvelt, people worked for it. We worked hard.”

People here once so admired Eleanor Roosevelt, who insisted the homes have running water and electricity, that they renamed the town for her, using the final syllables of her first and last names. But Norvelt has been bending toward the Republican Party for decades.

Now, Trump signs are everywhere. And the president’s framing of his campaign against Democrat Joe Biden as an existential fight against creeping socialism in America is rallying voters here. Disaffected current and former Democrats in surrounding Westmoreland County, and across small Rust Belt towns in Southwestern and Northeastern Pennsylvania, make up the core of Trump’s support in the state. These onetime Democratic bastions swung hard to Trump.

Interviews with more than a dozen voters, as well as historians who have studied Norvelt, suggest that the ethos of community born 86 years ago has given way to a more individualistic outlook — and quite a bit of fear.

“There’s this fear that we’re going to work hard and pay all the taxes for illegal immigrants to come in and not work as hard and get the same benefits, same schooling,” said the Rev. David Greer, pastor of the historic Norvelt Union Church, who lives in one of the original 1930s homes. “And we’re afraid of what we’re seeing. We don’t want our houses burned down.”

The fear here is not new and reflects familiar parts of Republican politics over the last 40 years, dating to when Ronald Reagan won over Democrats in places like Southwestern Pennsylvania by warning of “welfare queens.” But it’s been intensified amid sweeping peaceful protests against systemic racism, the looting and rioting that have occasionally followed those protests, and Trump’s efforts to make the violence a defining issue.

Eleanor Roosevelt tours a nursery school at Westmoreland Homesteads on May 21, 1937. After the First Lady's visit, residents held a contest and renamed the town after her, combining the final syllables of her first and last names.
NORVELT HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Eleanor Roosevelt tours a nursery school at Westmoreland Homesteads on May 21, 1937. After the First Lady’s visit, residents held a contest and renamed the town after her, combining the final syllables of her first and last names.

People in Norvelt are afraid what they’ve earned will go toward government help for those they think don’t work as hard. They’re afraid of losing their religious rights. Of losing their right to bear arms. And that the scenes they see playing out on TV in larger, faraway cities will come to their town of about 1,000 people.

Most residents work in nearby Latrobe, where Trump held a rally this month, or about 40 miles west in Pittsburgh. There’s a pizza place, a funeral home, an insurance broker, a hardware store, and a gun shop.

“More people are buying guns around here than since Sandy Hook,” Timi Fowler, who has worked at the Johnson Gun Depot for 12 years, said of the 2012 elementary school shooting that killed 26 people.

“They’re afraid of the Democrats getting into office,” she said. “That’s their biggest fear. They’re saying they took over the cities, now they’re going to take over our little towns. … You just gotta protect your own.”

David Greer, pastor of the Norvelt Union Church, outside his home in Norvelt. Greer's is the grandson of an original homesteade.
TOM GRALISH / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

David Greer, pastor of the Norvelt Union Church, outside his home in Norvelt. Greer’s is the grandson of an original homesteade.

Fowler has worked since she was 17, first at a factory making soda bottles, then loading trucks at Dick’s Sporting Goods. She helps support her son and husband.

Biden “wants to take everything you have and give it to people who don’t work or who don’t want to work,“ she said. “I’m sorry, I’m 58 and I’ve worked too many years to lose everything I have.”

See Full Article At Inquirer.com

Meet Norm Eisen: Legal Hatchet Man and Central Operative in the “Color Revolution” Against President Trump

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DC Color Revolution
WASHINGTON, DC - MAY 31: Police work to keep demonstrators back during a protest on May 31, 2020 in Washington, DC. Across the country, protests were set off by the recent death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota while in police custody, the most recent in a series of deaths of black Americans by the police. Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was taken into custody and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. (Photo by Tasos Katopodis/Getty Images)

In our report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News first drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government employs in so-called “Color Revolutions” and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.

Our recent follow-up to this initial report focused specifically on a shadowy, George Soros linked group called the  Transition Integrity Project (TIP), which convened “war games” exercises suggesting the likelihood of a  “contested election scenario,” and of ensuing chaos should President Trump refuse to leave office. We further showed how these “contested election” scenarios we are hearing so much about play perfectly into the Color Revolution framework sketched out Revolver News’ first installment in the Color Revolution series.

This  third installment of Revolver News‘ series exposing the Color Revolution against Trump will focus on one quiet and indeed mostly overlooked participant in the Transition Integrity Project’s biased election “war games” exercise—a man by the name of Norm Eisen.

Norm Eisen

As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as special counsel litigating the Ukraine impeachment, who created a template for Internet censorship of world leaders and a handbook for mass mobilizing racial justice protesters to overturn democratic election results, there is perhaps no man alive with a more decorated resume for plots against President Trump.

Indeed, the story of Norm Eisen – a key architect of nearly every attempt to delegitimize, impeach, censor, sue and remove the democratically elected 45th President of the United States – is a tale that winds through nearly every facet of the color revolution playbook. There is no purer embodiment of Revolver’s thesis that the very same regime change professionals who run Color Revolutions on behalf of the US Government in order to undermine or overthrow alleged “authoritarian” governments overseas, are running the very same playbook to overturn Trump’s 2016 victory and to pre-empt a repeat in 2020. To put it simply, what you see is not just the same Color Revolution playbook run against Trump, but the same people using it against Trump who have employed it in a professional capacity against targets overseas—same people same playbook.

In Norm Eisen’s case, the “same people same playbook” refrain takes an arrestingly literal turn when one realizes that Norm Eisen wrote a classic Color Revolution regime change manual, and conveniently titled it “The Playbook.”

Just what exactly is President Obama’s former White House Ethics Czar (yes, Norm Eisen was Obama’s ethics Czar), his longtime friend since Harvard Law School, who recently partook in war games to simulate overturning a Trump electoral victory, doing writing a detailed playbook on how to use a Color Revolution to overthrow governments? The story of Norm Eisen only gets more fascinating, outrageous, and indispensable to understanding the planned chaos unfolding before our eyes, leading up to what will perhaps be the most chaotic election in our nation’s recent history.

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“I’d Rather Have This Book Than The Atomic Bomb”

Before we can fully appreciate the significance of Norm Eisen’s Color Revolution manual “The Playbook,” we must contextualize this important book in relation to its place in Color Revolution literature.

As a bit of a refresher to the reader, it is important to emphasize that when we use the term “Color Revolution” we do not mean any general type of revolution—indeed, one of the chief advantages of the Color Revolution framework we advance is that it offers a specific and concrete heuristic by which to understand the operations against Trump beyond the accurate but more vague term “coup.” Unlike the overt, blunt, method of full scale military invasion as was the case in Iraq War, a Color Revolution employs the following strategies and tactics:

A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press. [Revolver]

This combination of tactics used in so-called Color Revolutions did not come from nowhere. Before Norm Eisen came Gene Sharp—originator and Godfather of the Color Revolution model that has been a staple of US Government operations externally (and now internally) for decades. Before Norm Eisen’s “Playbook” there was Gene Sharp’s classic “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which might be justly described as the Bible of the Color Revolution. Such is the power of the strategies laid out by Sharp that a Lithuanian defense minister once said of Sharp’s preceding book (upon which Dictatorship to Democracy builds) that  “I would rather have this book than the nuclear bomb.”

Gene Sharp

It would be impossible to do full justice to Gene Sharp within the scope of this specific article. Here are some choice excerpts about Sharp and his biography to give readers a taste of his significance and relevance to this discussion.

Gene Sharp, the “Machiavelli of nonviolence,” has been fairly described as “the most influential American political figure you’ve never heard of.”1 Sharp, who passed away in January 2018, was a beloved yet “mysterious” intellectual giant of nonviolent protest movements, the “father of the whole field of the study of strategic nonviolent action.”2 Over his career, he wrote more than twenty books about nonviolent action and social movements. His how-to pamphlet on nonviolent revolution, From Dictatorship to Democracy, has been translated into over thirty languages and is cited by protest movements around the world. In the U.S., his ideas are widely promoted through activist training programs and by scholars of nonviolence, and have been used by nearly every major protest movement in the last forty years.3 For these contributions, Sharp has been praised by progressive heavyweights like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize four times, compared to Gandhi, and cast as a lonely prophet of peace, champion of the downtrodden, and friend of the left.4

Gene Sharp’s influence on the U.S. activist left and social movements abroad has been significant. But he is better understood as one of the most important U.S. defense intellectuals of the Cold War, an early neoliberal theorist concerned with the supposedly inherent violence of the “centralized State,” and a quiet but vital counselor to anti-communist forces in the socialist world from the 1980s onward.

In the mid-1960s, Thomas Schelling, a Nobel Prize-winning nuclear theorist, recruited 29-year-old Sharp to join the Center for International Affairs at Harvard, bastion of the high Cold War defense, intelligence, and security establishment. Leading the so-called “CIA at Harvard” were Henry Kissinger, future National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, and future CIA chief Robert Bowie. Sharp held this appointment for thirty years. There, with Department of Defense funds, he developed his core theory of nonviolent action: a method of warfare capable of collapsing states through theatrical social movements designed to dissolve the common will that buttresses governments, all without firing any shots. From his post at the CIA at Harvard, Sharp would urge U.S. and NATO defense leadership to use his methods against the Soviet Union. [Nonsite]

We invite the reader to reflect on the passages in bold, particularly their potential relevance to the current domestic situation in the United States. Sharp’s book and strategy for “non violent revolution” AKA “peaceful protests” has been used to undermine or overthrow target governments all over the world, particularly in Eastern Europe.

Gene’s color revolution playbook was of course especially effective in Eastern Bloc countries in Eastern Europe:

Finally, there is no shortage of analysis as to the applicability of Sharp’s methods domestically within the USA in order to advance various left wing causes. This passage specifically mentions the applicability of Sharp’s methods to counter act Trump.

Ominous stuff indeed. For readers who wish to read further, please consult the full Politico piece from which we have excerpted the above highlighted passages. There is also a fascinating documentary on Sharp instructively titled “How to Start a Revolution.”

This is all interesting and disturbing, to say the least. In its own right it would suggest a compelling nexus point between the operations run against Trump and the Color Revolution playbook. But what does this have to do with our subject Norm Eisen? It just so happens that Eisen explicitly places himself in the tradition of Gene Sharp, acknowledging his book “The Playbook” as a kind of update to Sharp’s seminal “Dictatorship to Democracy.”

Watch the Clip Here 

And there we have it, folks—Norm Eisen, former Obama Ethics Czar, Ambassador to Czechoslovakia during the “Velvet Revolution,” key counsel in impeachment effort against Trump, and participant in the ostensibly bi-partisan election war games predicting a contested election scenario unfavorable to Trump—just happens to be a Color Revolution expert who literally wrote the modern “Playbook” in the explicitly acknowledged tradition of Color Revolution Godfather Gene Sharp’s “From Dictatorship to Democracy.” 

Before we turn to the contents of Norm Eisen’s Color Revolution manual, full title “The Democracy Playbook: Preventing and Reversing Democratic Backsliding,” it will be useful to make a brief point regarding the term “democracy” itself, which happens to appear in the title of Gene Sharp’s book “From Dictatorship to Democracy” as well.

Just like the term “peaceful protestor,” which, as we pointed out in our George Kent essay is used as a term of craft in the Color Revolution context, so is the term “democracy” itself. The US Government launches Color Revolutions against foreign targets irrespective of whether they actually enjoy the support of the people or were elected democratically. In the case of Trump, whatever one says about him, he is perhaps the most “democratically” elected President in America’s history. Indeed, in 2016 Trump ran against the coordinated opposition of the establishments of both parties, the military industrial complex, the corporate media, Hollywood, and really every single powerful institution in the country. He won, however, because he was able to garner sufficient support of the people—his true and decisive power base as a “populist.” Precisely because of the ultra democratic “populist” character of Trump’s victory, the operatives attempting to undermine him have focused specifically on attacking the democratic legitimacy of his victory.

In this vein we ought to note that the term “democratic backsliding,” as seen in the subtitle of Norm Eisen’s book, and its opposite “democratic breakthrough” are also terms of art in the Color Revolution lexicon. We leave the full exploration of how the term “democratic” is used deceptively in the Color Revolution context (and in names of decidedly anti-democratic/populist institutions) as an exercise to the interested reader. Michael McFaul, another Color Revolution expert and key anti-Trump operative somewhat gives the game away in the following tweet in which the term “democratic breakthrough” makes an appearance as a better sounding alternative to “Color Revolution:”

Most likely as a response to Revolver News’ first Color Revolution article on State Department official George Kent, former Ambassador McFaul issued the following tweet as a matter of damage control:

 

What on earth then might Color Revolution expert and Obama’s former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul, who has been a key player agitating for President Trump’s impeachment, mean by “democratic breakthrough?”

Being a rather simple man from a simple background, McFaul perhaps gave too much of this answer away in the following explanation (now deleted).

With this now-deleted tweet we get a clearer picture of the power bases that must be satisfied for a “democratic breakthrough” to occur—and conveniently enough, not one of them is subject to direct democratic control. McFaul, Like Eisen, George Kent, and so many others, perfectly embodies Revolver’s thesis regarding the Color Revolution being the same people running the same playbook. Indeed, like most of the star never-Trump impeachment witnesses, McFaul is or has been an ambassador to an Eastern European country. He has supported operations against Trump, including impeachment. And, like Norm Eisen, he has actually written a book on Color Revolutions (more on that later).

Norm Eisen’s The Democracy Playbook: A Brief Overview:

A deep dive into Eisen’s book would exceed the scope of this relatively brief exposé. It is nonetheless important for us to draw attention to key passages of Eisen’s book to underscore how closely the “Playbook” corresponds to events unfolding right here at home. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that regime change professionals such as Eisen simply decided to run the same playbook against Trump that they have done countless times when foreign leaders are elected overseas that they don’t like and want to remove via extra-democratic means—“peaceful protests,” “democratic breakthroughs” and such.

First, consider the following passage from Eisen’s Playbook:

If you study this passage closely, you will find direct confirmation of our earlier point that “democracy” in the Color Revolution context is a term of art—it refers to anything they like that keeps the national security bureaucrats in power. Anything they don’t like, even if elected democratically, is considered “anti-democratic,” or, put another way, “democratic backsliding.” Eisen even acknowledges that this scourge of populism he’s so worried about actually was ushered in with “popular support,” under “relatively democratic and electoral processes.” The problem is precisely that the people have had enough of the corrupt ruling class ignoring their needs. Accordingly, the people voted first for Brexit and then for Donald Trump—terrifying expressions of populism which the broader Western power structure did everything in its capacity to prevent. Once they failed, they viewed these twin populist victories as a kind of political 9/11 to be prevented by any means necessary from recurring. Make no mistake, the Color Revolution has nothing to do with democracy in any meaningful sense and everything to do with the ruling class ensuring that the people will never have the power to meddle in their own elections again. 

The passage above can be insightfully compared to the passage in Gene Sharp’s book noting ripe applications to the domestic situation.

It is instructive to compare the passage in Eisen’s Color Revolution book to the passage in Michael McFaul’s Color Revolution book

First off, it is absolutely imperative to look at every single one of the conditions for a Color Revolution that McFaul identifies. It is simply impossible not to be overcome with the ominous parallels to our current situation. Specifically, however, note condition 1 which refers to having a target leader who is not fully authoritarian, but semi-autocratic. This coincides perfectly well with Eisen’s concession that the populist leaders he’s so concerned about might be “illiberal” but enjoy “popular support” and have come to power via “relatively democratic electoral processes.”

Consulting the above passage from McFaul’s book, we note that McFaul has been perhaps the most explicit about the conditions which facilitate a Color Revolution. We invite the reader to supply the contemporary analogue to each point as a kind of exercise.

  1. A semi-autocratic regime rather than fully autocratic
  2. An unpopular incumbent (note blanket negative coverage of Trump, fake polls)
  3. A united and organized opposition (media, intel community, Hollywood, community groups, etc)
  4. An ability to quickly drive home the point that voting results were falsified—See our piece on the Transition Integrity Project
  5. Enough independent media to inform citizens of falsified vote (see full court press in media pushing contested election narrative, social media censorship)
  6. A political opposition capable of mobilizing tens of thousands or more demonstrators to protest electoral fraud (SEE BLACK LIVES MATTER AND ANTIFA)

On point number four, which is especially relevant to our present situation, Eisen has an interesting thing to say about the role of a contested election scenario in the Orange Revolution, arguably the most important Color Revolution of them all.

Finally, let’s look at one last passage from Norm Eisen’s Color Revolution “Democracy Playbook” and cross-reference it with McFaul’s conditions for a Color Revolution as well as the situation playing out right now before our very eyes:

A few things immediately jump out at us. First, the ominous instruction: “prepare to use electoral abuse evidence as the basis for reform advocacy.” Secondly, we note the passage suggesting that opposition to a target leader might avail itself of “extreme institutional measures” including impeachment processes, votes of no confidence, and, of course, the good old-fashioned “protests, strikes, and boycotts” (all more or less peaceful no doubt).

By now the Color Revolution agenda against Trump should be as plain as day. Regime change professionals like McFaul, Eisen, George Kent, and others, who have refined their craft conducting color revolutions overseas, have taken it upon themselves to use the same tools, the same tactics—quite literally, the same playbook—to overthrow President Trump. Yet again, same people, same playbook. 

We conclude this study of key Color Revolution figure Norm Eisen by exploring his particularly proactive—indeed central role—in effecting one of the Color Revolution’s components mentioned in the Eisen Playbook—impeachment.

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The Ghost of Democracy’s Future

We mentioned at the outset of this piece that Norm Eisen is many things—a former Obama Ethics Czar (but of course), Ambassador to Czechoslovakia, participant in the now notorious Transition Integrity Project, et cetera. But he earned his title as “legal hatchet man” of the Color Revolution for his tireless efforts in promoting the impeachment of President Trump.

The litany of Norm Eisen’s legal activity cited at the beginning of this piece bears repeating.

As the man who implemented the David Brock blueprint for suing the President into paralysis and his allies into bankruptcy, who helped mainstream and amplify the Russia Hoax, who drafted 10 articles of impeachment for the Democrats a full month before President Trump ever called the Ukraine President in 2018, who personally served as DNC co-counsel for litigating the Ukraine impeachment…

If that resume doesn’t warrant the title “legal hatchet man” we wonder what does? We encourage interested readers or journalists to explore those links for themselves. By way of conclusion, it simply suffices to note that much of Eisen’s impeachment activity he conducted before there was any discussion or knowledge of President Trump’s call to the Ukrainian President in 2018—indeed before the call even happened. Impeachment was very clearly a foregone conclusion—a quite literal part of Norm Eisen’s Color Revolution playbook—and it was up to people like Eisen to find the pretext, any pretext.

Despite their constant invocation of “democracy” we ought to note that transferring the question of electoral outcomes to adversarial legal processes is in fact anti-Democratic—in keeping with our observation that the Color Revolution playbook uses “democracy” as a term of art, often meaning the precise opposite of the usual meaning suggesting popular support.

Perhaps the most important entry in Eisen’s entry is the first, that is, Eisen’s participation in the infamous David Brock blueprint on how to undermine and overthrow the Trump presidency.

The Washington Free Beacon attended the retreat and obtained David Brock’s private and confidential memorandum from the meeting. The memo, “Democracy Matters: Strategic Plan for Action,” outlines Brock’s four-year agenda to attack Trump and Republicans using Media Matters, American Bridge, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), and Shareblue.

The memo contains plans for defeating Trump through impeachment, expanding Media Matters’ mission to combat “government misinformation,” ensuring Democratic control of the Senate in the 2018 midterm elections, filing lawsuits against the Trump administration, monetizing political advocacy, using a “digital attacker” to delegitimize Trump’s presidency and damage Republicans, and partnering with Facebook to combat “fake news.” [Washington Free Beacon]

This leaked memo was written before President Trump took office, further suggesting that all of the efforts to undermine Trump have not been good faith responses to his behavior, but a pre-ordained attack strategy designed to overturn the 2016 election by any means necessary. The Color Revolution expert who suggests impeachment as a tactic in his Color Revolution “playbook” was already in charge of impeachment before Trump even took office—-Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) is run by none other than Norm Eisen.

But the attempt to overturn the 2016 election using Color Revolution tactics failed. And so now the plan is to overthrow Trump in 2020, hence Norm Eisen’s noted participation in the Transition Integrity Project. Looking around us, one is forced to ask the deeply uncomfortable question, “transition into what?”

To conclude, we would like to call back to a point we raised in the first piece in our color revolution series. In this piece, we noted that star Never Trump impeachment witness George Kent just happens to be running the Belarus desk at the State Department. Belarus, we argued, with its mass demonstrations egged on by US Government backed NGOS, its supposed “peaceful protests” and of course its contested election results all fit the Color Revolution mold curiously enough.

One NGO called the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (TDWG) was bold or reckless enough to draw the parallels between the Color Revolution in Belarus and the events playing out against Trump explicitly. In response to a remark by a twitter user that the TDWG’s remarks about Belarus suggested parallels to the United States, the TDWG ominously replied:

 

Now, would the reader care to take a guess as to who runs the Transatlantic Democracy Working Group? If you guessed Norm Eisen, you would be correct.

Stay tuned for more in Revolver.news’ groundbreaking coverage of the Color Revolution against Trump. Be sure to check out the previous installments in this series.

This Article Originally Appeared On Revolver.News

Transition Integrity Project: Is this Soros Linked Group Plotting a “Color Revolution” Against President Trump?

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Soros Neocon Revolution

In our previous report on Never Trump State Department official George Kent, Revolver News drew attention to the ominous similarities between the strategies and tactics the United States government employs in so-called “Color Revolutions” and the coordinated efforts of government bureaucrats, NGOs, and the media to oust President Trump.

This follow-up report will focus specifically on how the “contested election scenario” we are hearing so much about plays into the Color Revolution framework — indeed, sowing doubt about the democratic legitimacy of the target and coupling it with calls for massive “mostly peaceful” demonstrations comes straight out of the Color Revolution playbook. And this is precisely the messaging we’ve seen from by those same key players in media, government, and the Democrat Party machine, most prominently from a shadowy George Soros-linked group known as the Transition Integrity Project — more about them soon.

First, a quick note on Color Revolutions. A “Color Revolution” in this context refers to a specific type of coordinated attack that the United States government has been known to deploy against foreign regimes, particularly in Eastern Europe deemed to be “authoritarian” and hostile to American interests. Rather than using a direct military intervention to effect regime change as in Iraq, Color Revolutions attack a foreign regime by contesting its electoral legitimacy, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press.

It would be disturbing enough to note a coordinated effort to use these exact same strategies and tactics domestically to undermine or overthrow President Trump. The ominous nature of what we see unfolding before us only truly hits home when one realizes that the people who specialize in these Color Revolution regime change operations overseas are, literally, the very same people attempting to overthrow Trump by using the very same playbook. Given that the most famous Color Revolution was the “Orange Revolution” in the Ukraine, and that Black Lives Matter is being used as a key component of the domestic Color Revolution against Trump, we can encapsulate our thesis at Revolver with the simple remark that “Black is the New Orange.”

Transition Integrity Project:

So what is the Transition Integrity Project, and what does it have to do with the Color Revolution against Trump? Here is how friendly media outlets represent the Transition Integrity Project and its agenda:

A bipartisan group of about 80 political operatives and academics has been involved in discussions about what could happen if President Donald Trump were to lose the November election and then contest the results, potentially refusing to leave the White House.

The Boston Globe first reported on Sunday that the group of Democrats and Republicans (all of whom oppose the president) convened an online meeting to hash out scenarios as part of what has been called the Transition Integrity Project in June. [Newsweek]

Of course, what they do not say about this ostensibly “bipartisan” group is that its founder, Rosa Brooks, is a long-time close associate of George Soros and his Open Society Foundation. She served both as special counsel to the President at George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and as a Board Member of the Open Society Foundation.

In 2006-2007, Brooks was Special Counsel to the President at the Open Society Institute in New York. Brooks has also served as a consultant for Human Rights Watch… She currently serves on the advisory board of the Open Society Foundation’s US Programs, the advisory board of National Security Action and the board of the Harper’s Magazine Foundation. [Georgetown Law]

Media outlets such as the National Pulse have drawn attention Rosa Brooks’ Soros connections as well as some interesting connections to Democrat Presidential candidate Joe Biden. It is certainly suspicious that the head of a group claiming to be bipartisan, which runs war games that reinforce the dangerous new talking point that President Trump won’t concede the election, just happens to be linked to George Soros and Joe Biden. To top it all off, Never Trump Russiagate fanatics Bill Kristol and David Frum participated in the study as well. In fact, the entire project appears to be a collaboration between establishment Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans. Shockingly, when anti-Trump Republicans pretended to be him in a simulation, they had him do a bunch of illegal and unconstitutional acts! Wow, what an incredibly revealing simulation!

On the one hand it is tempting to look at this as just another case of Democrat operatives falsely representing themselves as bi-partisan and getting away with it due to a compliant media. There is of course some truth to this, but in a deeper sense this interpretation misses the plot completely. The domestic Color Revolution framework hints at something far more dangerous and sinister. George Soros and his Open Society Foundation have played key roles in the Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe, including the famous Orange Revolution and Euromaidan Revolution in the Ukraine, in which mass demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience were organized in order to overthrow the target regime helmed by Russia-aligned Yanukovich. Setting aside the question of whether the overthrow of Yanukovich was justified or in American interests, what is crucial here is the similarity not only in method but even in vocabulary. Mass demonstrations are part of the Color Revolution playbook, especially when they can incite crackdowns that can then be used as further pretext to escalate demonstrations against the target regime. Notice the vocabulary George Soros’ Open Society Foundation used to describe the Euromaidan protests:

In late November 2013, Ukrainians took to the streets in peaceful protest after then-president Viktor Yanukovych chose not to sign an agreement that would have integrated the country more closely with the European Union….

The International Renaissance Foundation part of the Open Society family of foundations, has supported civil society in Ukraine since 1990. For 25 years, the International Renaissance Foundation has worked with civil society organizations defending human rights and justice, tackling corruption, supporting Ukrainian minorities including Tatars and Roma, pursuing health and education reform, and helping to facilitate Ukraine’s European integration.

The International Renaissance Foundation played an important role supporting civil society during the Euromaidan protests. The foundation ensured that legal aid was made available throughout the crisis to civic activists, protesters, and journalists; supplied victims of violence with medical care; enabled civil society solidarity and organization; supported channels like Hromadske TV in independent, live reporting about events on the Maidan; and documented cases of torture, beatings, and police and courts abuse. [Open Society Foundation]

This description of the Euromaidan Color Revolution by Brookings Institute scholar Steven Pifer is worth noting:

February 21 marks the sixth anniversary of the end of Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution. Three months of largely peaceful protests concluded in a spasm of deadly violence. President Victor Yanukovych fled Kyiv and later Ukraine, prompting the Rada (Ukraine’s parliament) to appoint acting leaders pending early elections. [Brookings Institute]

Prior to his post at Brookings, Steven Pifer was of course an Ambassador to Ukraine under President Obama. And, of course, he was actively involved in promoting the failed Ukraine-themed impeachment attempt against President Trump.

It’s important to look at the context of what was happening between the U.S. and Ukraine on July 25, Pifer told McFaul. For one thing, Trump had put nearly $400 million in military aid for Ukraine on hold before the call took place. In addition, the two countries were in the midst of planning a meeting between the two leaders at the Oval Office at the time.

“Those are big things for Zelensky, particularly at the beginning of his term in office,” said Pifer, who is a William J. Perry fellow at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. “If he can show that he delivers on the assistance and also on the photo op with the American president — that looks really good at home. And it’s also a good message to send to the Russians: ‘I’ve got a relationship with the Americans.’” [Stanford’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies]

Pifer’s interlocutor here, McFaul, just happens to have been the Senior Ambassador to Russia under Obama during the period of the Maidan protests. McFaul is yet another Color Revolution specialist who played an active role promoting the impeachment of President Trump. In fact, after Revolver’s story exposing State Department official George Kent, McFaul took to Twitter to denounce the term “color revolution” in favor of the more palatable “democratic breakthrough.”

 

McFaul’s Color Revolution bona fides are so substantial he literally wrote the book on it. He is one of two editors of a series of essays “Revolution in Orange” about the Orange Color Revolution in Ukraine.

The dramatic series of protests and political events that unfolded in Ukraine in the fall of 2004—the “Orange Revolution”—were seminal both for Ukrainian history and the history of democratization. Pro-Western presidential candidate Viktor Yushchenko was poisoned with dioxin, an industrial pollutant that left him weakened and horribly disfigured. When this assassination attempt failed, the Kremlin-backed ruling party resorted to voter intimidation and massive electoral fraud to win the runoff election. Supporters of Yushchenko responded with a series of strikes, sit-ins, and marches throughout Ukraine. Thanks in large part to this peaceful revolution, the election results were annulled. [Amazon]

Does this plot sound familiar?

Of course this Color Revolution book received a nice blurb by none other than George Soros himself.

Keen observers of the recent transition, Aslund and his coauthors write with authority about the challenges and opportunities Ukraine faces today. Drawing on broad experience in the region, they examine the situation through a comparative lens. This book should be read carefully by students and policy makers alike.”

—George Soros, Chairman, Open Society Institute

We can start to get a sense that a curiously high percentage of key Trump opposition figures, especially those involved with the impeachment of the President, have or have had some kind of professional role overseeing Color Revolutions in Eastern Europe. The people most viciously and effectively targeting Trump today are regime change professionals of the Color Revolution variety, whose preferred playbook involves a combination of attacking the legitimacy and electoral integrity of their target, mobilizing mass demonstrations of “mostly peaceful protesters,” and using any effort to crack down on said protests to further escalate the offensive against the target regime.

Here is a passage from one of the key books on Color Revolutions, literally called “The Playbook.” The reader may find some of the highlighted passages relevant to the domestic situation unfolding before our eyes.

Here is another passage:

The author of this book, conveniently titled “The Democracy Playbook” just happens to have also participated in the Transition Integrity Project.

Now that we are armed with the Color Revolution framework, and the specific role that electoral legitimacy plays in that model, we are in a strong position to evaluate the true agenda behind the Transition Integrity Project’s “War Game” scenario suggesting that Trump won’t concede the election. The title of Rosa Brooks’s Washington Post piece is suggestive, prompting us to wonder whether it is a prediction or a threat: “What’s the Worst that Could Happen: The Election Will Likely Spark Violence and a Constitutional Crisis:”

A landslide for Joe Biden resulted in a relatively orderly transfer of power. Every other scenario we looked at involved street-level violence and political crisis.

Translation: vote for Biden, or else.

Soon, Attorney General William P. Barr opens an investigation into unsubstantiated allegations of massive vote-by-mail fraud and ties between Democratic officials and antifa. In Michigan and Wisconsin, where Biden has won the official vote and Democratic governors have certified slates of pro-Biden electors, the Trump campaign persuades Republican-controlled legislatures to send rival pro-Trump slates to Congress for the electoral college vote.

Translation: despite severe problems with mail in voting, any effort by the Justice Department to ensure the integrity of a mass mail-in system will be interpreted in advance as part of an authoritarian coup on the part of Trump. In other words, if Trump takes any reasonable measures to prevent the Color Revolution coup against him, he will automatically be acting in an authoritarian manner justifying said Color Revolution against him. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

In every exercise, both teams sought to mobilize their supporters to take to the streets. Team Biden repeatedly called for peaceful protests, while Team Trump encouraged provocateurs to incite violence, then used the resulting chaos to justify sending federalized Guard units or active-duty military personnel into American cities to “restore order,”

Translation: No matter how violent these “peaceful protests” become, any effort by Trump to establish authority will be used to confirm the pre-determined conclusion that he is an authoritarian and that extraordinary measures must be taken to remove him from office.

Social media platforms can commit to protecting the democratic process, by rapidly removing or correcting false statements spread by foreign or domestic disinformation campaigns and by ensuring that their platforms aren’t used to incite or plan violence.

Translation: Social media must be fully censored leading up to the election. Facebook is already doing its part, for instance, by aggressively censoring any mention of Kyle Rittenhouse that suggests he acted in self-defense (he did).

When people unite to demand democracy and the rule of law, even repressive regimes can be stopped in their tracks.

Trump’s is a “repressive regime” and therefore extraordinary measures usually reserved for repressive regimes overseas–namely, color revolutions–are justified to prevent him from taking office. Note that this sentiment was echoed explicitly in a similar “roundtable” discussion on the election done by the New York Times a little over a week ago. One of the contributors, Jamelle Bouie, spelled it out quite explicitly:

I think the Democratic party and its affiliated institutions and organizations need to be prepping basically a defense of ballot counting, sort of a nationwide effort to stop that tampering. I think there needs to be plans for protests and demonstrations. This is going to sound very hyperbolic, but I think that we have to think of the task of getting Trump out as less of a traditional democratic transition and more of something akin to pushing an authoritarian regime out. [New York Times]

One does not “vote out” an authoritarian regime, or they are not authoritarian. Dictatorships are only overthrown, and Bouie’s statement is an explicit call to do exactly that.  The actually-peaceful process of voting must be supplemented–or supplanted–with “mostly peaceful protests” if the result isn’t correct. Which leads us to the next passage from Rosa Brooks:

Mass mobilization is no guarantee that our democracy will survive — but if things go as badly as our exercises suggest they might, a sustained, nonviolent protest movement may be America’s best and final hope.

Translation: Just in case Biden isn’t able to win fair and square, they have introduced a mail-in voting system that dramatically increases the likelihood of some type of contested election scenario. If that occurs, the outcome of the election will no longer be in the realm of democratic choice, where perhaps the forces against Trump have a disadvantage. Instead, the election becomes an issue of sustained mass mobilization of demonstrators capitalizing on every opportunity for escalation, a full court press by media demonizing every effort by Trump to restore order as authoritarian, and a transmission of the electoral process to court battles which disadvantage Trump.

There is of course one scenario, a very dark one, that remains unexplored. If the Color Revolution against Trump frames him as an authoritarian unwilling to leave office, the only alternative is to remove him by force. Both Al Gore and Joe Biden have already taken the extremely irresponsible and dangerous step of floating a military role in removing Trump should their Color Revolution not turn out the way they plan.

If Trump lost the election but refused to accept the results, Gore said he believes the military would intervene. He noted that under the parameters of the Constitution, Trump’s last day in office is Jan. 20, 2021. [Fox News]

So they are setting things up in such a way as to almost ensure that a clear winner will not exist on Election Day, and framing any refusal of President Trump to concede as grounds for military removal. This final stage of the Color Revolution is something that Rosa Brooks of the Transition Integrity Project has entertained for quite some time. The following excerpt is from a piece Rosa Brooks wrote shortly after the 2016 election, suggesting a fourth way to remove Trump from office before 2020.

The fourth possibility is one that until recently I would have said was unthinkable in the United States of America: a military coup, or at least a refusal by military leaders to obey certain orders. [Foreign Policy]

And this is how the Color Revolution operation against Trump and by extension against all of his supporters evidently concludes—with the possibility of a military coup.

After 2016, a critical mass of ruling class factions in the national security apparatus, state bureaucracies, Big Tech, and media decided that they would never allow the American people to meddle in their own elections again. And as a result of this contempt for the will of the people, our country is closer to an existential crisis than it has been at any period since the Civil War.

In an age of mandated masks there is one metaphorical mask that is slipping—that is the mask of pretty illusions that covered up the true nature of the American power structure with phrases like “liberal democracy.”  As this mask slips and we confront both the face and the fist of evil, we must do everything in our power to prevent the complete transformation of this country into the brutal, soulless tyrannies our would be overlords imagine for us and our posterity.

Stay tuned for more explosive coverage of this attempted Color Revolution. Much more to come.

The Curious Case of George Kent: State Department’s Belarus “Color Revolution” Expert And “Never Trump” Impeachment Witness

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George Kent

One of the most frustrating features of the Trump Administration is its tendency to hire, and even promote, personnel who are either indifferent or actively opposed to President Trump and the America First agenda he ran on in 2016.

Although the Administration remains crawling with such subversives, saboteurs, and so-called “Never Trumpers,” one especially interesting case is State Department employee George Kent.

George Kent was a star witness at the Trump impeachment hearings, in which he described Trump’s actions in Ukraine and the United States as “injurious to the rule of law.”

Highlights of his testimony include defending fellow star impeachment witnesses Marie Yovanovitch, Fiona Hill, and Lt. Col. Vindman, and accusing the President’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, of conducting a “campaign of lies.” Perhaps most damningly, Kent directly attacked President Trump on precisely the issue at question in the impeachment trial when he gave a second-hand description of President Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelinsky.

Trump’s July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, was so unusual that a National Security Council official — Lt. Col. Alex Vindman, who also has testified for the inquiry — didn’t want to get into the details with Kent. That call is now at the heart of the impeachment inquiry.

“It was different than any read-out call that I had received,” Kent told investigators. “He felt — I could hear it in his voice and his hesitancy that he felt uncomfortable. He actually said that he could not share the majority of what was discussed because of the very sensitive nature of what was discussed.”

Kent told investigators that, based on his conversations with other senior American diplomats, Gordon Sondland relayed that Trump “wanted nothing less than President Zelensky to go to microphone [sic] and say investigations, Biden, and Clinton.” [Politico]

Unlike his former boss and star impeachment witness Yovanovitch, or his fellow impeachment witnessses Lt. Colonel Vindman and William Taylor, George Kent was not fired from his position within the Trump Administration. Far from being fired, Kent was promoted within the Trump Administration’s State Department subsequent to his impeachment testimony against the President.

George Kent, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs at the State Department, testifying as an impeachment witness.

That Kent not only kept his job but was promoted after providing such impeachment testimony is a surprising and lamentable fact, especially given the President’s strong and largely successful commitment to clean house in the aftermath of impeachment proceedings in which many State Department officials connected with Ukraine and Eastern Europe testified as witnesses against the President.

 

That a key impeachment witness against the President not only remains within the Trump Administration, but was actually promoted, is remarkable enough. He should be removed from his position just like his colleagues and fellow impeachment witnesses Yovanovitch, Vindman, and Taylor.

But once one takes a look at what George Kent’s job actually is at the State Department, the story becomes far more suggestive—even explosive. Kent just happens to be Deputy Assistant Secretary in the European and Eurasian Bureau. This bureau is generally known as the State Department hub for so-called “Color Revolutions,” through which the State Department, together with covert agencies and a constellation of allied NGOs influence, and at times overturn, elections in foreign countries. Indeed, one former senior state department official has told Revolver News that Kent is a “color revolution expert” — a designation that has been corroborated to Revolver by two current senior State Department sources.

Prior to his current role, Kent served as Deputy Chief of Mission in Kyiv, Ukraine (2015-18), working directly under the ousted star-impeachment witness Ambassador Yovanovitch. Prior to this, Kent was working as a “deputy political counselor” in Ukraine during the infamous “Orange Revolution” — arguably the most famous of the State Department and NGO-facilitated “Color Revolutions.” In essence, the Orange Revolution refers to a continuous barrage of protests, mass demonstrations, and other acts of civil disobedience in Ukraine in response to the contested election of Russia aligned Viktor Yanukovych, who defeated the Western-backed Viktor Yushchenko.

What is relevant here is not whether Yanukovych rigged the election, or whether he would have been a better ruler for Ukraine. What is relevant is that the State Department’s preferred candidate did not win, and the State Department, with the help of its constellation of friendly NGOs, helped to facilitate the overthrow of Yanukovych by contesting the legitimacy of the election, organizing mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and leveraging media contacts to ensure favorable coverage to their agenda in the Western press — all tactics eerily similar to those used against President Trump beginning the day after he was elected.

Of course, the principal figure associated with this Orange Revolution in the US Government is none other than Victoria Nuland, who served as President Obama’s point person on Russia during the Color Revolution in Ukraine.

Nuland was a year into her role as Obama’s assistant secretary for Europe. She had been in Kiev, frantically working behind the scenes to put in place a new governing coalition in Ukraine as it teetered on the brink of revolution against its Russia-backed leader, Viktor Yanukovych. [Politico]

Nuland took the extraordinary step of personally speaking to the mass of protesters organized against the Russian-backed President Yanukovych.

Nuland’s highly symbolic appearance in the square came a day after Secretary of State John Kerry issued a strong statement, expressing the United States’ “disgust with the decision of Ukrainian authorities to meet the peaceful protest … with riot police…” [CBS News]

“Peaceful protest” sounds mighty familiar, doesn’t it? That’s because organizing mass demonstrations against a target government and criticizing and provoking that target government into cracking down on said protests is part and parcel of the Color Revolution playbook.

Careful observers of recent events will note that it is no coincidence that this is precisely the playbook being run right now in Belarus.

Indeed, the entire constellation of State Department-aligned and Atlanticist-aligned NGOs have been questioning in advance the legitimacy of the newly-elected Lukashenko, who won decisively with over 80 percent of the vote, compared to his rival, who received less than 10 percent.

These same State Department and NGO-aligned groups have been encouraging mass protests against Lukashenko. Perhaps most notably, they’ve referred to the demonstrators specifically as “peaceful protestors,” and used any attempts to control the riots as a pretext to further undermine the legitimacy of the target government.

 

 

 

If the prominent use of women as demonstration props seems familiar, its because the Atlanticist networks tasked with Color Revolution operations have explicitly identified tactical “feminism” as a leverage point in undermining target regimes. Here’s one such acknowledgement from the German Marhsall Fund — a key node in the State Department-linked Color Revolution NGO Axis (more about them later).

The similarity between the Atlanticist-backed Belarus riots and the way the organized ANTIFA and BLM protests operate in the United States is impossible to ignore. Indeed, many of the Color Revolution experts currently fixated on Belarus have explicitly made this comparison in relation to the United States. The Transatlantic Democracy Working Group (more about them later) is a deeply anti-Trump so-called “bipartisan” group that is essentially a Who’s Who of every influential Color Revolution regime-change NGO in the World.

 

 

Many have noticed theoretical parallels and similarities between how US State Department and associated Atlanticist NGOs run color revolutions in foreign countries, and the sustained operations targeted against Trump in the United States. The case of George Kent — and many others to be exposed in this series — demonstrates that these similarities are not merely theoretical—they literally involve the same people! The very same people running cover revolution operations in Ukraine and Eastern Europe have been using the very same playbook to overturn 2016 and destroy the legitimacy of President Trump’s election.

And guess who runs the Belarus station at the State Department? If you guessed George Kent, the “color revolution professional,” you might be right.

Stay tuned for more explosive information in this series. Many more will be exposed (don’t worry, the receipts are already archived).

 

This Essay Originally Appeared On Revolver.News

The Coming Coup? Michael Anton

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Democrats are laying the groundwork for revolution right in front of our eyes.

As if 2020 were not insane enough already, we now have Democrats and their ruling class masters openly talking about staging a coup. You might have missed it, what with the riots, lockdowns and other daily mayhem we’re forced to endure in this, the most wretched year of my lifetime. But it’s happening.

It started with the military brass quietly indicating that the troops should not follow a presidential order. They were bolstered by many former generals—including President Trump’s own first Secretary of Defense—who stated openly what the brass would only hint at. Then, as nationwide riots really got rolling in early June, the sitting Secretary of Defense himself all but publicly told the president not to invoke the Insurrection Act. His implicit message was: “Mr. President, don’t tell us to do that, because we won’t, and you know what happens after that.”

All this enthused Joe Biden, who threw subtlety to the winds. The former United States Senator (for 26 years) and Vice President (for eight) has not once, not twice, but thrice confidently asserted that the military will “escort [Trump] from the White House with great dispatch” should the president refuse to leave. Another former Vice President, Al Gore, publicly agreed.

One might dismiss such comments as the ravings of a dementia patient and a has-been who never got over his own electoral loss. But before you do, consider also this. Over the summer a story was deliberately leaked to the press of a meeting at which 100 Democratic grandees, anti-Trump former Republicans, and other ruling class apparatchiks got together (on George Soros’s dime) to “game out” various outcomes of the 2020 election. One such outcome was a clear Trump win. In that eventuality, former Bill Clinton White House Chief of Staff John Podesta, playing Biden, refused to concede, pressured states that Trump won to send Democrats to the formal Electoral College vote, and trusted that the military would take care of the rest.

The leaked report from the exercise darkly concluded that “technocratic solutions, courts, and reliance on elites observing norms are not the answer here,” promising that what would follow the November election would be “a street fight, not a legal battle.”

Two more data points (among several that could be provided). Over the summer, two former Army officers, both prominent in the Democrat-aligned “national security” think tank world, wrote an open letter to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs in which they urged him to deploy the 82nd Airborne Division to drag President Trump from the Oval Office at precisely 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021.

About a month later, Hillary Clinton declared publicly that Joe Biden should not concede the election “under any circumstances.” The old English major in me interprets the word “any” to mean “no,” “none,” “nada,” “niente,” “zero,” “zilch” “bupkis”…you get the idea.

This doesn’t sound like the rhetoric of a political party confident it will win an upcoming election.

The Cover-Up in Plain Sight

These items are, to repeat, merely a short but representative list of what Byron York recently labeled “coup porn.” York seems to think this is just harmless fantasizing on the part of the ruling class and its Democratic servants. For some of them, no doubt that’s true. But for all of them? I’m not so sure.

In his famously exhaustive discussion of conspiracies, Machiavelli goes out of his way to emphasize the indispensability of “operational security”—i.e., silence—to success. The first rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy. The second rule of conspiracy is, you do not talk about the conspiracy.

So why are the Democrats—publicly—talking about the conspiracy?

Because they know that, for it to succeed, it must not look like a conspiracy. They need to plant the idea in the public mind, now, that their unlawful and illegitimate removal of President Trump from office will somehow be his fault.

Never mind the pesky detail that the president would refuse to leave only if he were convinced he legitimately won. Remember: Biden should not concede under any circumstances.

The second part of the plan is either to produce enough harvested ballots—lawfully or not—to tip close states, or else dispute the results in close states and insist, no matter what the tally says, that Biden won them. The worst-case scenario (for the country, but not for the ruling class) would be results in a handful of states that are so ambiguous and hotly disputed that no one can rightly say who won. Of course, that will not stop the Democrats from insisting that they won.

The public preparation for that has also already begun: streams of stories and social media posts “explaining” how, while on election night it might look as if Trump won, close states will tip to Biden as all the mail-in ballots are “counted.”

The third piece is to get the vast and loud Dem-Left propaganda machine ready for war. That leaked report exhorted Democrats to identify “key influencers in the media and among local activists who can affect political perceptions and mobilize political action…[who could] establish pre-commitments to playing a constructive role in event of a contested election.” I.e., in blaring from every rooftop that “Trump lost.”

At this point, it’s safe to assume that unless Trump wins in a blowout that can’t be overcome by cheating and/or denied via the ruling class’s massive propaganda operation, that’s exactly what every Democratic politician and media organ will shout.

Stop the Presses

What then? The Podesta assumption is that the military will side with the Dems. There are reasons to fear they might. The Obama administration spent a great deal of political capital purging the officer corps of anyone not down with the program and promoting only those who are.

Still and all, determining the outcome of an election would be the most open political interference possible from our allegedly apolitical military, and it’s plausible that the brass won’t want to make its quiet support of the ruling class agenda that overt. The aforementioned Chairman has already stated that the military will play “no role” in the outcome of the election. That’s probably not a feint, but one wonders if it will hold given the obvious attempt to influence military thinking by people like Jeffrey Goldberg in his recent Atlantic essay.

Can the Dems rely on the Secret Service to drag Trump out? I have my doubts on this one. I’ve seen the Service up close; it really is (or strongly appears to be) apolitical. It has a job to do: protect the president, whoever that is. Officers take that job very seriously. If they don’t believe Trump lost, I don’t think they can be counted on to oust him. On the other hand, were they to believe he did lose and was refusing to leave—a scenario I find impossible to imagine but the Democrats insist is just around the corner—it’s possible the Service might act.

Barring all that, what’s left? Remember that phrase from the Dem war game: “street fight.” In other words, a repeat of this summer, only much, much bigger. Crank the propaganda to ear-drum shattering decibels and fill the streets of every major city with “protesters.” Shut down the country and allow only one message to be heard: “Trump must go.”

I.e., what’s come to be known as a “color revolution,” the exact same playbook the American deep state runs in other countries whose leadership they don’t like and is currently running in Belarus. Oust a leader—even an elected one—through agitation and call it “democracy.”

The events of the last few months may be interpreted as an attempted color revolution that failed to gain enough steam, or as a trial run for the fall. Is the Trump Administration prepared?

Here’s one thing they could do: play their own “war game” scenario so as to game out possibilities and minimize surprises. They should also be talking to people inside and outside of government whom they absolutely trust to get a clearer sense of who on the inside won’t go along with a coup and who might.

They also need to set up or shore up—now—communication channels that don’t rely on the media or Big Tech. Once the ruling class gives word that the narrative is “Trump lost,” all the president’s social media accounts will be suspended. The T.V. channels, with the likely exception of Fox News, will refuse to cover anything he says. Count on it. He’s going to need a way to talk to the American people and he has to find the means, now.

For the rest of us, the most important thing we can do is raise awareness. If there is a conspiracy to remove President Trump from office even if he wins, they’re telling you about it precisely to get you ready for it, so that when it happens you won’t think it was a conspiracy; you’ll blame the president.

Don’t be fooled.

This Essay Originally Appeared on America Mind

Playing With Fire: Democrats and Their Military Quislings Flirt With Borderline Seditious Military Coup

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Satan Mattis

As the election approaches, more and more ominous evidence is quickly piling up that the U.S. military’s nearly 250-year separation from national politics is eroding. Frightening signs indicate that senior members of the military are open to an anti-Trump coup d’etat. If such a coup happens, Democrats will gleefully cheer it on.

Revolver wants make clear that this article is not based on any inside information. Nobody on the Joint Chiefs of Staff is passing on warnings about what the military is planning. Instead, this article is based on a reading of public statements and events, which are already worrisome enough.

The first red flag is buried in Bob Woodward’s latest book on the Trump Administration, Rage. According to the book, former Defense Secretary James Mattis spent much of his tenure in office plotting to undermine the elected leader who appointed him.

The book documents private grumblings, periods of exasperation and wrestling about whether to quit among the so-called adults of the Trump orbit: Mattis, [then Director of National Intelligence Dan] Coats and then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.

Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.” [Washington Post]

The Post glances over this incident quickly, treating it as just one more example of a disgruntled senior Trump official. But it is far more than that. This is the top defense official in the United States, himself a former general, discussing “collective action” against the president with a top intelligence official. “Collective action” could take many forms, perhaps a concerted effort to invoke the 25th Amendment and have the president declared incapacitated and removed. This would be a coup, and it would be motivated not by Trump’s incapacity, which is justa fig leaf, but by political disagreements.

Later, when the President had rioters cleared from Lafayette Square after several days of violence and destruction, Mattis suggested the president’s decision was illegal.

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside. [The Atlantic]

Dispersing violent rioters who have already nearly burned down a church is not “violating the Constitutional rights of fellow citizens.” Make no mistake, Mattis knows exactly what he is suggesting. When soldiers are given an illegal order, they must refuse. Mattis is laying the groundwork for soldiers and generals to refuse the president’s orders. From there, it is a very small step to simply removing the president entirely.

Mattis is now a private citizen. But there are worrying signs the current military brass, the commanders, are steeling themselves to intervene in civilian politics. On June 2, after the worst week of rioting in America since the MLK assassination riots, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley issued a public memo that served as a public warning to the president.

 

“As members of the Joint Force…you embody the ideals of our Constitution,” Milley wrote. “Please remind all of our troops and leaders that we will uphold the values of our nation, and operate consistent with national laws and our own high standards of conduct at all times.”

Remember the context. President Trump had just publicly floated the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act to suppress rioting in cities where local mayors were unable, or unwilling, to protect ordinary citizens. Press outlets like CNN suggested that this law, which has been used in many cases exactly like this summer’s riots, would be illegal for President Trump to use. In the middle of that crisis, Milley’s rhetoric about the Constitution and “the right to freedom of speech and peaceful assembly” was, in essence, a repetition of the press’s propaganda that that deadly riots across the country were “mostly peaceful protests.”

In this context, Milley’s vow to “uphold the values of our nation” takes on a darker tone. It sounds less like a promise and more like a warning that if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act against rioters, the military will defy him.

Milley should have been removed from command for his memo. But of course, President Trump is not remotely the authoritarian that perhaps he should be. Milley remains in office, ready to defy the president whenever he feels like it.

Democrats and their allies are counting on commanders like Milley to swing into action if necessary. In June, Joe Biden himself explicitly floated the idea that the military will help remove Trump from power.

Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden sounded an alarm Wednesday about GOP moves to limit voting access, saying his “single greatest concern” is that President Donald Trump will “try to steal this election.” But, the former vice president said, he is “absolutely convinced” the military would escort Trump from the White House if he loses the election but refuses to leave office.

Asked by Trevor Noah on “The Daily Show” if he’s ever considered what would happen if Trump would not leave the White House if he loses, Biden responded, “Yes, I have.”

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Still, Biden said Wednesday, he believes if Trump has lost the election, military leaders would not allow him to refuse to leave office.

Saying he was “so damn proud” of the military leaders who have recently criticized Trump, Biden continued, “you have so many rank and file military personnel saying, well, we’re not a military state, this is not who we are. I promise you, I’m absolutely convinced, they will escort him from the White House in a dispatch.” [CNN]

Not to be outdone, former Democrat presidential candidate Al Gore chimed in.

If Trump lost the election but refused to accept the results, Gore said he believes the military would intervene. He noted that under the parameters of the Constitution, Trump’s last day in office is Jan. 20, 2021.

“It’s important to say that it’s really not up to him. I hear people saying, ‘Well, would he accept that decision?’ Well, it doesn’t matter because it’s not up to him,” he said. “Because at noon on January 20th, if a new president is elected… the police force, the Secret Service, the military, all of the executive branch officers, will respond to the command and the direction of the new president.” [Fox News]

Biden and Gore envision a scenario where Trump clearly loses the 2020 election and then throws a temper tantrum and refuses to leave the White House. Such a scenario is an absurdity. It is far more plausible that the 2020 election will be hotly contested, and Democratic leaders will simply declare victory, and then turn to the press and big tech to endorse their claims. Then, they will turn to the military to enforce what they have decided. It is also possible that, in a contested election, Democrats will order their “peaceful protesters” to invade and menace the capital. If President Trump orders the use of force to maintain order, the establishment will seize upon this as an excuse for the military to revolt against him.

The press is obediently doing its part to lay the groundwork for a military coup as well. The Atlantic story accusing President Trump of disrespecting U.S. soldiers isn’t just a standard election-time hitpiece. It serves the double purpose of trying specifically to alienate Trump from the military rank and file. The very same press which had no problem undermining the military in every way imaginable during wars like Vietnam and Iraq, is now filled with outraged articles about the president’s “attacks” on the military and defense contractors.

The president has responded perfectly. He pointed out the real reason he has enemies in the military establishment.

 

The Democrats and their establishment allies in the media and military-industrial complex will do everything in their power to ensure that the American people will never be able to meddle in their own elections again.

The evil forces that control much of the United States will rule out nothing in their desperate quest to hold onto power—not even the military option. That current and former high ranking military brass such as Mattis are willing to entertain such talk, even indirectly and with plausible deniability, should alarm anybody who cares about the future of the American republic.

Just as Americans had to learn the hard way that corporate America has become fully corrupt with woke ideology, so must we now confront the difficult reality that the same disease has thoroughly infiltrated institutions that Americans traditionally thought of as “patriotic” and “conservative.” This includes the police forces, the FBI, and even the Military — and goes all the way to the top.

This of course does not mean that everyone in law enforcement or the military is an agent of the corrupt ruling class — far from it. Many, and probably most who serve in these institutions — especially rank and file — are some of the best Americans we have. It is precisely due to the natural orientation of the military toward patriotism that the ruling class has dedicated so much energy to subvert this institution. At the highest levels, they have unfortunately been successful.

We must acknowledge the difficult reality that every single institution in the country, including much of the upper military brass, has come under the control of forces that are utterly hostile to the interests of the American people. It is only on the basis of this sober, clear-eyed understanding that we will be able to stop these would-be usurpers from stealing the election in 2020 — and, with the election secured, go about the long, challenging, and ultimately triumphant process of taking back our country for good.

This Article Originally Appeared On Revolver News

CDC VIOLATES PRESIDENTIAL ORDER WITH CRITICAL RACE THEORY TRAINING PROGRAM

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BOMBSHELL: The Center for Disease Control is moving forward with a critical race theory training program—in violation of the President’s executive action.

The 13-week series is called “Naming, Measuring, and Addressing the Impacts of Racism on the Health and Well-Being of the Nation and the World.”

The first three training sessions are focused on “racism, sexism, and other systems of structured inequality,” then teaching CDC employees that they must “address institutionalized racism” to “really set things right in the garden” of a racist nation.

In sessions 6 through 9, the CDC claims that “racism is a public health crisis” and that “systemic racism” leads to “police killings of unarmed Black and Brown men and women” and leads to “the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on communities of color.”

In sessions 10 and 11, the trainers will teach CDC employees that they must “target” and destroy the values of “focus on the individual,” the “myth of meritocracy,” the “myth of American exceptionalism,” and “White supremacist ideology.” This is textbook critical race theory.

The final session teaches CDC employees how to become activists. They will be encouraged to join an “Anti-Racism Collaborative with eight Collective Action Teams,” focused on “communications,” making scientific publications “anti-racist,” and influencing “policy and legislation.”

The Official Agenda for the 13-Week Course

 

This Article Originally Appeard on ChristopherRufo.com

Exclusive: Data shows that half of 2019 donations to ActBlue came from untraceable ‘unemployed’ donors

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Trump & Biden

EXCLUSIVE: Less than two months ahead of the presidential election – with concerns of foreign interference again at the forefront – a conservative political group is raising “serious concerns” about millions of donations reported by a major Democratic fundraising platform.

A  preliminary computer analysis by the Take Back Action Fund, obtained exclusively by Fox News, has found that nearly half of all 2019 donations to ActBlue were made by people claiming to be unemployed.

Action Fund President John Pudner questioned the veracity of those donations and called it a loophole that must be closed for the sake of election integrity.

“After downloading hundreds of millions of [dollars in] donations to the Take Back Action Fund servers, we were shocked to see that almost half of the donations to ActBlue in 2019 claimed to be unemployed individuals,” he said. “The name of employers must be disclosed when making political donations, but more than 4.7 million donations came from people who claimed they did not have an employer. Those 4.7 million donations totaled $346 million ActBlue raised and sent to liberal causes.”

The trend is continuing this year: An Action Fund examination of 2020 data from January through August showed an uptick in “unemployed” donations through ActBlue, to 50.1% this year.

ActBlue defends the integrity of its donations and said many come from retirees and people who aren’t counted as employed, such as homemakers.

According to the findings of the Action Fund – a nonprofit that aims to “educate the public on conservative solutions for political reform” – 48.4% of ActBlue donations last year, prior to the massive loss of jobs that came with the onslaught of the coronavirus pandemic, came from those who did not list an employer or who claimed to be unemployed.

Pudner said the large number is a red flag that some donations may be illicit contributions from foreign interests attempting to impact U.S. elections.

“It is hard to believe that at a time when the U.S. unemployment rate was less than 4 percent, that unemployed people had $346 million dollars to send to ActBlue for liberal causes,” Pudner said, adding that “4.7 million donations from people without a job … raised serious concerns.”

Continue Reading on FoxNews.com

Wildfires Will Become Worse Thanks To Decades-Old Liberal Policies, Says Fire Expert Who Predicted Uptick In Blazes

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Wildfires California
reuters
  • Former President Bill Clinton’s land management rules and other liberal policies paved the way for future debilitating wildfires, fire expert Bob Zybach told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
  • Zybach warned of potential disastrous wildfires shortly after Clinton signed a slate of rules in the mid-1990s that drastically reduced logging and road creation on federal lands. 
  • Zybach’s comments come as California, Oregon, and parts of Washington deal with catastrophic wildfires that have killed 26 people and destroyed buildings.

Former President Bill Clinton made a significant change to federal land management nearly 30 years ago that created the conditions necessary for massive wildfires to consume portions of the West Coast, according to one fire expert who predicted the problem years ago.

Shortly before leaving office in 2001, Clinton limited the ability of the United States Forest Service to thin out a dense thicket of foliage and downed trees on federal land to bring the West into a pristine state, Bob Zybach, an experienced forester with a PhD in environmental science, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The former president’s decision created a ticking time bomb, Zybach argues.

“If you don’t start managing these forests, then they are going to start burning up. Thirty years later, they are still ignoring it,” said Zybach, who spent more than 20 years as a reforestation contractor. He was referring to warnings he made years ago, telling officials that warding off prescribed burns in Oregon and California creates kindling fuelling fires.

Continue Reading on DailyCaller.com

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